


The Wrong Kind of Red

by ahimsabitches



Category: NaPolA | Before the Fall (2004)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-07-25 13:37:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7534756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches





	The Wrong Kind of Red

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [The Wrong Kind of Red](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8049838) by [Baldanders](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baldanders/pseuds/Baldanders)



_What are ghosts?_ Albrecht asks himself as he moves through the silent, winter-dim halls. _They’re not evil spirits or malign presences or restless soul bent on harrying the living._ His hand brushes the smooth wall, the color of lichen-coated bone. _They’re memories dug up from their graves in the loamy folds of the brain to pitch us back to another time and place, either gilded by nostalgia or sooted by some eldritch combination of time and emotion._ The rafters are dark, but he knows the shapes of the crisscrossed beams, the smell of woodsmoke that has leaked down from them ever since he came here.

_What, then, am I?_

Albrecht smiles to himself. His bare shoulder brushes, affectionately, the glass case that holds the school’s boxing accolades. Though neither his name or face is displayed there, Friedrich inhabits that glass case; he is fisted in every pair of gloves and perches on every dully gleaming medal.

The weight of Friedrich’s name, even sullied in disgrace, is heavy in the air still. Albrecht’s smile turns bitter at the edges. _Friedrich is the ghost here_ , he thinks. The weight of Friedrich’s unsteady boots is heavy on his shoulders too as he leans against the stone that is his home, in the long grass beneath the window that gives on a room in which a lamp and a young lady once glowed.

The castle grounds must be a riot of green upon endless rolling green now that it’s summer. But a milkwhite film covers Albrecht’s eyes, and it’s always winter in his head.

Fat puffy flakes drift lazily past the window in the white-tiled bathroom where he’d cried. They clot in the cracks of the cobbled courtyard where Friedrich had gutchecked their sportsmaster. The ghosted memory raises another smile, this one toothed. 

Skinny birches stand skeletal sentinel over Russian bones buried in earthen graves far shallower than the graves in which they lie in the mind of the school.

 _I’m buried like those Russians,_ he thinks. _Just like those Russians. A blight on the stones; the wrong kind of red.  
_

_I wonder if my father still reads my essay._

The ice is on the lake. Albrecht Stein parks his bony flanks on the edge of the swimming hole, slides in, and returns home.


End file.
